ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the phenomenon—which encompasses legal discourses as well as political processes and practices,—is instrumental for maintaining and reorganizing state power by framing protest as a destabilizing Other rather than as an integral part of the existing political order. In political theory it is commonplace to comprehend a formal state of emergency as a legal–political instrument when facing a crisis, that is, as a provision which is accompanied by a shift of powers from the legislative to the executive branch and by the restriction of basic rights and freedoms. Post-colonial perspectives emphasize the parallels of such current politics of exception with colonial governing. The regulation of protest through politics of exception follows an expansionary logic: more and more parts of the social are connoted as “threats” reflecting (in-)securitization processes. In late modern societies threats are perceived as difficult to foresee and thus volatile and non-containable.
